SOE Resistance 2024 – Player reviews & quotes
“What a game. And its hard to call it that considering how much it felt like we were experiencing a snapshot of history. It felt like a love letter and a promise not to let those men and women be forgotten”
“I’m very grateful that such a great team was willing and able to organise an absolute amazing event!”
“Thank you to the organisers and staff for putting together such a remarkable experience, not only with immersive training but in capturing the difficulties of daily life during war.”
“Thank you guys, for creating such an amazing experience. It was….real. Better than a movie.”
“The reflection of this particular piece of history will stay with me for the rest of my life. You are incredible”
“This was a mind-blowingly good and well planned larp-experience”
“SOE was amazing, emotional, exhausting, real, physical, eye opening and deeply moving. Thank you to everyone involved, I feel privileged and very lucky to have played it”
“This week I attended the single most entertaining educational and intense experiences of my life so far. It took 3 days, and I’ll remember it for life…. it’s widened my horizons in all the most positive ways”
“It was my hope that spending a few days paddling on the shores of this much mythologised era of ordinary people called to perform extraordinary things would, if handled with appropriate grace and care, open up a seam through which we could glimpse a reflection of the staggering enormity of what it was that they were asked to do.
Thank you so, so very much for pouring your heart and soul into allowing us to catch that glimpse. The memories of the last few days – and my awe at quite how many moving parts you managed to successfully coordinate in order to forge them – will be with me for some time”
“I have been taking part in LARP for over 20 years and my job involves educating about the Resistance in WW2. When I signed up for this LARP I had very great reservations. I was nervous about coming to larp in England for the first time and I was not expecting much. What you have done here is miraculous. Everything is correct, in-period and seamless. You have managed to commemorate the past in a very immersive and sensitive way. You have created something much more than just a LARP; this is something else. This is Time Travel.
I could even go further: for me, the main achievement is to have succeeded in going far beyond the stage of the atmosphere and the realistic setting, and to have created a real functional ‘school’ providing, in just over two days, a striking concentration of the real training of SOE agents as known to us from archives, documents, eyewitness accounts and historians’ studies.
I have also never seen, in a larp, such a committed, credible and charismatic team and NPCs”
“Today… we ended up in front of this statue about S.O.E. remembrance… For a second, I forgot. I forgot I was a 21st century girl, and not a S.O.E. trainee. For a second, I had this strong and deep feeling that I had lived it and been part of that amazing organisation, and that those “ordinary people” that were shot because they try and did amazing things, I had shared a part of their road. I felt I had known some of them, that maybe some were even friends that I had made in my (all of it too short) journey during finishing courses. It took me maybe fifteen seconds to remember where I was and at what date.
So its not true of course, I wasn’t really there: but the emotions, strong and overwhelming, felt so very real that I cried for about thirty minutes standing in front of that statues and walking London’s street. And I couldn’t help myself but think to all those that are currently at war in some part of the world, and to think that thanks to that very special moment, my understanding of what they lived, what they’re living as we speak, is now a little better, a little stronger. That I am even more outraged by wars and conflicts than I previously was. That this is now written deep down in my memory and feelings and it will not go away.
I will never have enough thanks to all of you, players, NPCs, writers for this precious gift you gave me. I feel honoured, invested, and proud to have been a part of it. It will stay on in me and I shall never forget it. Thank you all”
“The attention to detail, not just in props and costume, but everything: writing detailed backstories that intersected with one another, realistic training session that covered firearms, code breaking, communications and bobby trapping; detailed realistic NPCs played wondrously by superb crew, who took their roles seriously and who had a knowledge and passion for the historical setting and the complicated nature of the politics involved in the SOE. Just like 80 years ago, players/candidates came from Europe, Scandinavian countries, Greece and Britain to train and I know have travelled home with the ghost of their characters sat next to them wondering where they will be deployed and how long they might survive. What made this Larp so special wasn’t just the detail and meticulous planning that went into it, but that it paid respect to those agents, many whose names have been forgotten, by having one foot firmly planted in historical context. I know every player left feeling a connection to those ordinary folk who gave all to help save the world”
